Ben's expertise is in the field of international political communication. He is Specialist Adviser to the UK House of Lords Select Committee on Soft Power and UK Influence. The committee aims to understand how power and influence are changing in a transformed global media and geopolitical landscape and how the UK can most effectively exercise power within that landscape. It will publish its report in March 2014.

Through a number of projects, books and articles he has explored how politics and security are changing in the new media ecology. This work is drawn together in the book War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), co-authored with Professor Andrew Hoskins. He has published articles in Political Studies, Review of International Studies, International Affairs, International Journal of Press/Politics, Journalism, and many other peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Ben is Co-Editor of the Sage journal Media, War & Conflict. The journal was launched in 2008. It is a major international, peer-reviewed journal that maps the shifting arena of war, conflict and terrorism in an intensively and extensively mediated age. In 2013 Ben hosted the journal's Fifth Anniversary Conference at Royal Holloway.

This body of work on media and security is part of a broader interest in understanding the role and influence of political ideas, the translation and adaptation of ideas across different groups of actors and institutions, and the ways in which social and political life is becoming not so much mediated as mediatized. He has published extensively on security and conflict in the new media ecology (see publications). Ben is a founding Editor of the journal, Media, War and Conflict (Sage, from April 2008).

His current research addresses two questions.

In international affairs, how do states use strategic narrativesto project their interests and identities to shape the behaviour of other actors?

In domestic politics and society, how are digital technologies creating “the new mass” society, the return of a dense social mainstream which people unconsciously locate themselves inside or as ‘radicalised’ outsiders?

Ben is Director of Research in the Department of Politics and International Relations.